


Christopher Street (It's a Free, Free World)

by tolstayas



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Gay Pride, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Snake!Crowley - Freeform, its tender and gay lads!, the part of the title in parentheses is from play the game by queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 18:18:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19382143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: At exactly twelve o’clock on June 28th, 1970, the intersection between 6th Avenue and 59th Street rang out with the whistles, shouts and laughter of hundreds of human beings demanding, loudly, the right to live truly and safely as themselves.





	Christopher Street (It's a Free, Free World)

**Author's Note:**

> _Rest your weary head and let your heart decide_   
>  _It's so easy when you know the rules_   
>  _It's so easy, all you have to do is fall in love!_

At exactly twelve o’clock on June 28th, 1970, the intersection between 6th Avenue and 59th Street rang out with the whistles, shouts and laughter of hundreds of human beings demanding, loudly, the right to live truly and safely as themselves. 

 

Hundreds of human beings, and two, well, supernatural ones. To be fair, only one of the two was actually engaging in any sort of whistling, shouting, or laughing. The other was standing at the margins of the crowd, looking a little nervous. 

 

One might be surprised to discover that the angel was the one making all the noise. Crowley had never been quite comfortable in a crowd; his preferred social activities included enigmatic lurking in empty graveyards, or ominous slithering through dark, abandoned alleyways. And, very occasionally, the company of one celestial being in particular.

 

 Right at that moment, this particular celestial being happened to catch his eye.

 

“Aziraphale?”

 

He hadn’t said it loudly, but Aziraphale could have picked that voice out anywhere. He wove his way through the crowd towards the sound, incredulous.

 

“Crowley?” 

 

“What are you doing here?” Crowley tried to grimace, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was also wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, which dampened the effect somewhat.

 

“Oh, you know! Making history!” Aziraphale gestured vaguely at the crowd, grinning at his own… Well, it wasn’t quite a joke, really. But he thought it was funny when he said it.

 

“We never…” Crowley stopped to look around, just to be safe. “We never _arranged_ this one, did we?”

 

Aziraphale’s eyes widened, taken aback. “ _Arranged?_ Why would you say that? I’m just doing my job!” When Crowley furrowed his eyebrows, doubtful, he went on: “Equality, love, freedom, that sort of thing. I thought I was doing quite well just now! If you think I’m _collaborating_ \--”

 

Crowley interrupted him with an amused noise. “Huh. Because, ah, I was actually thinking this might be one of ours.”

 

“One of yours?” 

 

“You know. Us. Downstairs.”

 

“Why ever would you think that?”

 

Crowley tilted his head back and frowned pensively. “So… He’s not with you then?”

 

Aziraphale followed his gaze. A man was standing across the street from the rest of them, holding up a sign painted black. Its white lettering spelled out _that_ passage from Leviticus, followed by the words: “Jesus is serious about His creation!” The angel’s face twisted into an expression of disgust Crowley didn’t know he could manage.

 

“Alright, then, I guess not. Whatever. It just felt right being here, I suppose. And anything that _feels_ right has got to be wrong, no?”

 

Aziraphale politely refrained from voicing the possibility that sometimes, perhaps, Crowley might show symptoms of certain… _good_ tendencies. Instead he asked, “Have you seen the bookshop?”

 

“What are you, a - a - a goldfish? It’s been there a hundred years! Of course I’ve seen the bookshop!”

 

“Not _my_ bookshop, the other one!”

 

“The _other one_? What other one?”

 

“The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. It’s quite delightful.”

 

Crowley’s eyes lit up behind his sunglasses. “Oh, good old Oscar! Shame I never met him...”

 

Aziraphale gave him a nostalgic, almost touching look, but only for a second; then suddenly he smiled that sort of glowing smile, the sort that raised his eyebrows and scrunched up his nose. “You would have liked him, terribly much! When was was it I met him, 1881? Yes, of course, at the party with the flamingoes! Quite delightful, you should have been there... But listen, you have got to see the bookshop, it’s just wonderful. And you absolutely _must_ meet Craig!”

 

Crowley didn’t argue. Neither did he bother to ask who Craig was; easier just to follow Aziraphale wherever it was he wanted him to go.

 

The bookshop was not quite what he was expecting, having only frequented one particular and not-especially-ordinary bookshop in all his six thousand earthly years. This one had, oddly, much less of a Victorian feel to it. Craig, as it turned out, was the friendly man who owned the store. Perhaps a little too friendly.

 

“So you managed to drag your boyfriend over here after all!” He said, smilingly, when he noticed the black-clad, heart-shaped-glasses-wearing shadow slinking behind Aziraphale. Faux-subtly, in Crowley’s direction, he mouthed: _I’ve heard a lot about you._

 

Crowley stepped hurriedly away from Aziraphale as if on hallowed ground, feeling a little bit humiliated, or perhaps a little bit exposed. The angel blushed profoundly.

 

“Oh, um…” Aziraphale hesitated. Crowley waited for him to say, “He’s not my boyfriend.” He never did say that. Instead he asked, “You’re not at the march?”

 

“Yeah! I’m just getting some things, I was on my way out. Miracle you caught me here in time!”

 

Aziraphale fought the urge to wink at Crowley, who was standing a respectable distance away from him, staring at his shoes. 

 

“Just thought I’d drop by. Brilliant work on all this, by the way,” said the angel, who had been grinning all day, and showed no sign of stopping. 

 

“You know what I like about that place?” He whispered to Crowley on their way back from the bookshop.

 

“It’s got books in it?”

 

“It feels _loved_. Didn’t you notice?”

 

“Er… Not really my area, love. More of an angel thing.”

 

Aziraphale wasn’t quite stupid enough to believe that, but he let it slide, and changed the subject.

 

“I do like the sunglasses, in case you were wondering.”

 

That seemed to cheer him up a little. “Thanks, angel. I stole them.”

 

“Crowley!”

 

“Saw them lying around somewhere. So I took them. Idiot’s own fault for leaving their things unguarded.”

 

Aziraphale rolled his eyes in the closest approximation of disapproval he could muster up. Still, back amongst the whistles and shouts and whatnot, he couldn’t help but notice the demon’s discomfort. 

 

“Is everything alright?”

 

“Yeah. Course it is. Am I ever not alright?”

 

Aziraphale let that one slide, as well. “What would you say to a picnic?” 

 

“Thought you’d never ask.”

 

There they were, then, an angel and a demon in Central Park, surrounded on all sides by bagels and cream cheese, and strawberries, and ten different kinds of chocolate bars, and so on. Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry, they say; well, angels don’t exactly get hungry, but this one did have a bit of a sweet tooth. And he didn't come to America very often; one had to make the most of it. 

 

Crowley waited until they had settled down before bringing up the conversation in the bookshop.

 

“So, what was all that about boyfriends?” He tried to sneer. It wasn’t entirely convincing.

 

Aziraphale only blushed a little. “Oh, well, you know how it is. Fitting in with the humans. I couldn’t properly say, oh no, he’s not my boyfriend, he’s just my very close friend whom I’ve known for roughly six thousand years - could I now? Besides, it’s not so far off!”

 

“How about _‘I’ve heard a lot about you’_? What is it he’s heard, exactly?”

 

The blush grew a little deeper; the angel waved a hand dismissively. “He was, um, just exaggerating, I think. In fact, I never told him anything about you at all, except -” Aziraphale raised his eyebrows and started counting on his fingers - “well, that we met in a garden, and that we’ve known each other a long time, and that you saved my life a few times, and that you have lovely red hair, and that you drive very fast, that’s only five things! And I never actually _said_ that you were my boyfriend, by the way, so I don’t know why he assumed  -”

 

“ _I never told him anything about you at all,_ ” Crowley mimicked.

 

“Oh, don’t be cruel. If I knew it would offend you I wouldn’t have said a thing.”

 

Crowley scoffed at that. “Offend me? I’m a demon.” Aziraphale looked so apologetic that he almost felt the need to comfort him. “I’m just taking the piss.”

 

Aziraphale smiled a small, timid smile.

 

They sat there for a while after the angel had eaten his fill, their legs dappled in sunlight, leaning against the trunk of a tree. A young couple was sitting a little ways away from them, holding hands, shoulder to shoulder. They both pretended they weren’t watching them, but when the couple kissed the angel and the demon both turned away awkwardly and scrambled for a different direction to look in, which sort of gave away their act.

 

The silence that had until then been pleasant had now become faintly bothersome. Aziraphale cleared his throat. “Crowley, do you -” and there was a strange sadness in the angel’s voice - “do you ever yearn? Er, you know, for something else?” 

 

He was thinking of the young couple, of course, not in particular, but in general, the way angels tended to think about the mortal world. Thinking of a closeness beyond imagination, an un-forbidden, perfect, natural thing. Love, perhaps.

 

“Mhm.” Crowley nodded faintly. Aziraphale didn’t prod him any further; that was enough. He understood.

 

And when he reached out to take Crowley’s hand in his own, was that not the most natural thing in the world?

 

When Crowley turned to look at him, heart bruised with the ache of thawing ice, six thousand winters’ worth; and when he rested his head resignedly in the crook of the angel’s neck, was that not the purest note ever played upon the long, unbroken harp-string of fate?

 

When, eventually, after hours or days or millennia, the burning angel met the gentle demon’s lips with his own, and they both shut their eyes in fear or in reverence, was that not written in the scriptures, written since the very beginning?

 

It was only appropriate, really. That day of all days.

 

There is a fallacy recurrent in human thought processes known in Latin as _cum hoc ergo propter hoc_ , and more recently in English as the idea that correlation implies causation. Human minds possess a natural narrative tendency that prompts them, for no reason whatsoever, to decide intuitively that two entirely independent events, if they occur in close enough succession, must quite certainly be linked by causality. If, for instance, a conversation in a bookshop happened to allude to a romantic relationship between two individuals, and if shortly afterwards these very same individuals were seen snogging in the middle of Central Park… Well, a human mind might jump to the conclusion that the conversation may have given them ideas, so to speak. But of course celestial and occult beings such as those we are discussing are not subject to the flights of human fancy; and an occurrence as momentous as the union between beings of Heaven and Hell couldn’t possibly be put down to a statistical error - could it?

 

No, there was something else going on here, anyone could tell. Something inelcutable, and formidable, and, well… ineffable, perhaps.

 

“I suppose this isn’t a good moment to turn into a great big snake,” murmured Crowley, drowsily, into Aziraphale’s collar.

 

“Well, it’s… certainly not the conventional thing to do, er. In situations like this.”

 

“On the other hand,” mused the demon, “this is New York City. It won’t be the strangest thing anyone’s seen this week. And it’s such a nice day to bask in the sun…”

 

“Oh - um - oh! I see!” Aziraphale - who had been about to say something about how nevertheless, it wouldn’t be proper! - spluttered, as the demon, who had already curled himself quite effectively against his angel’s side, metamorphosed around him. A scaly head nuzzled against his neck; a forked tongue darted out to kiss his cheek. “This is alright, I suppose. It’s, er, it’s quite nice, actually. But I’m worried we might frighten someone like this, my dear.” 

 

The hiss the demon replied with was a gentle, if mischievous, laugh. 

 

“Oh, and wouldn’t _that_ be the end of the world!”

 

“Well, alright, then. If you insist.”

 

Crowley hissed fondly. So there they lay entwined in the early-afternoon sun, quietly cherishing the time they had ahead of them, half-asleep and completely content.


End file.
